“Yeah, well, we’ve had a big advantage this whole time, haven’t we? I mean, sixteen of us? One of it? And it’s pitching a shutout. The scoreboard says Serpent: 11, SEALs: 0.”
“If we had known it was here when we came onboard—”
“We would have just nuked this tub,” Moretti finished my sentence. It wasn’t what I had been planning to say, but his solution was appealing. “Shit, maybe we still should. We’ve all got some C-4, little door-busting charges. If the Serpent’s gonna track us all down anyway, we could just blow this thing, crack the pressure hull and make sure it doesn’t get away.”
Neither would we, of course.
“I don’t think we’re quite there yet. I’m not ready to give up,” I said.
“Who’s giving up? Our mission now is to kill this thing, and if it looks like we’re not going to survive that mission, we better make damn sure it doesn’t get away.”
“Mortally wounded, the heroic soldier hides a live grenade under his belly until the enemy troops stumble onto his position.”
Moretti ignored my sarcasm. “You’re missing the point. We want to survive. Obviously. But if it looks like we can’t do that-and it’s getting to that point, wouldn’t you agree? — we should make sure it doesn’t either.”
“Hey, can we talk about something else?” Reyes said. “I mean, seriously. We’re sitting here in the dark with a couple of fresh corpses, and until someone tells me how to get out of this fucked-up mess, I’d like to pretend it ain’t here.”
What else could we pretend we were doing? Holding an armed slumber party?
“Some cards would be nice,” Moretti said.
“Yeah. You ain’t never won a hand against me, Chief. Be good to get back to shore with a little extra cash.”
It was unbelievable. But it was right.
“Maybe we could make some s’mores,” I said, and Reyes giggled. An honest giggle, like a Cub Scout on a campout who’d just heard a dirty joke. A Cub Scout with a fist tattooed on his neck.
“Or talk about girls,” Moretti said. “Just no ghost stories.”
No, we didn’t need any of those.
The air was still. I hadn’t noticed it moving much before the power went out, but its utter tranquility was tangible now. It was a wool blanket of close, unpleasant smells. If the darkness had been complete, I might have guessed we were in some bizarre combination of machine-parts factory and nineteenth-century hospital.
“You know what this shit is like?” Reyes said. “It’s like sitting in my parents’ garage. My brother, my homeboy Mike and I would go out there in the summer, after curfew, and sit there in the dark and pass around a jay. It was so much like this, with the smoke and the flashlights. We’d be burning up, but we couldn’t open a window to cool off because of the smell. And we wanted to talk, but we had to whisper because my parents’ room was right over the garage.”
“You got any smoke?”
“Sorry, Chief, I left it in my footlocker. Maybe the doctor’s got some. What do they call it… medicinal?”
“All I have is some aspirin. Sorry, guys. But hey, if we can get the underwater telephone working, I can call someone. He’ll charge extra, though.”
We had gotten all the mileage we could out of the pot jokes. It seemed as though we should be sitting in a circle, but the hatch demanded our attention. Looking away from it felt like death.
I didn’t want to listen to my thoughts in silence.
“Well, you know what it feels like to me?” I said. “I wasn’t kidding about the s’mores thing. It reminds me of being on a campout, you know? Like inside your tent, with flashlights, staying up after the adults have gone to bed.”
“Break out the porn mags and dirty jokes,” Moretti said, his braces flashing as he smiled.
“Naw, man, she totally was a Girl Scout. Right?”
“Nope. Never did anything like that. But I grew up in West Virginia. So I had mountains and trees in my backyard. Camping was what we did on the weekends, for fun. When we were kids, we’d make Mom go with us, sort of like a family social event. Then once we got older-and knew our way around the woods-we could go out there by ourselves.”
“West Virginia. Yeah, you have the accent. I couldn’t place it right away,” the chief said.
“Oh, come on, I’m a city girl now. College educated, even.”
“But you still got some country in you. That’s cool, Doc, that’s cool.” Reyes, by contrast, sounded as if he’d been born in a land of concrete and steel and never had left. “So did your dad take you hunting and shit? You look like you know what you’re doing with that MP-5.”
This wasn’t a conversation I’d ever expected to have.
“My dad. No, he didn’t take me hunting. He, uh… I didn’t know him very well.”
“More of a mama’s little girl? You probably had a brother, didn’t you? I’ll bet Pops hung out with him all the time.”
I could see Moretti shifting in my peripheral vision, trying to make eye contact with the other man. “Reyes, shut up.”
“What? I’m just-”
“Quit giving her shit, all right? Why do you want to hear about her personal life? Are you gonna tell her about how your pops had to kiss some gangbanger’s shoes back in the ’hood?”
“Damn, man, I was just making conversation. Forget about it.”
“You know what? It’s all right,” I said, throwing myself into the middle of their exchange. It was all right. I didn’t care. Discussing my childhood-or anything else-didn’t seem painful or dangerous right now. “Go ahead. Ask me anything you want.”
And we were in the tent again, playing truth or dare, probing each other’s secrets.
Reyes looked at me, then Moretti, then back to me.
“Anything?”
“Go for it.”
“Why do you keep fussing with that rubber band on your wrist?”
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that one. I tried not to just fall into a rehearsed answer.
“It’s a story of love, death and carcinogens,” I said.
“Sounds like a good one,” Reyes said.
“A bad one, actually. A very bad one. I took up smoking a couple of months after I took my second job at the CIA. The one I have now.” I paused, thinking back to the first butt, handed to me as I stood over a dismembered field agent in Serbia. “It’s something a lot of us do. It calms you down, gives your fingers something to do and kills your taste buds a little bit. You can’t smell as much.
“And there’s something about the act of smoking that separates you from your surroundings a little bit, I think. The smoke is kind of like a wall. It detaches you from the rest of the world if you want it to. That’s helpful.
“The day I first put a rubber band on my wrist was… there’s only one other point in my life that even comes close to being so horrible. And I was really too young to remember that one. This was about two years ago. In September. I had been sent to New Orleans the night before, to a crime scene in an Upper 9th Ward housing project. The local cops had found a decomposing body in an abandoned apartment there and escalated the case to the feds when they found a Koran and a couple of folders with Arabic documents in them. Nothing conclusive, of course, but the body appeared to have been tortured, and of course they assumed it was terrorism. That’s what I read in the case summary on my red-eye flight.
“So I go into this apartment: God, more water stains than wallpaper, creaky floors, a decrepit moldy smell that would have been overwhelming if it weren’t for the even more powerful reek of rotting flesh. There’s the body. Male, slumped over, tied to a chair in the middle of the room. Right off the bat, I’m guessing this person’s been dead about a week-long enough to smell, but not long enough to totally disintegrate. I can also tell that the locals were right about torture: the body was naked, and you could see elongated burn marks on the legs and groin region.”